After 44 years of work, director Michael Haneke has mastered the art of making you feel drained and defeated over the course of an agonizing two-hour movie. And I mean that as high praise! The director of Funny Games, Caché, Amour, and The White Ribbon is the master of feel-bad cinema, telling stories that are generally free of hope and easy answers…and are made all the more powerful for it.

Now, the 75-year old German filmmaker is looking to make you feel a lingering sense of dread in the pit of your stomach for a much longer period of time. He’s bringing his skill sets to television with a new show titled Kelvin’s Book.

Michael Haneke is not known for light-heartedness. The Austrian filmmaker behind Funny Games, Caché, The White Ribbon, and Amourspecializes in challenging, often incredibly bleak dramas where all is not right in the world.

So when Haneke’s new film was announced with the title Happy End, most people familiar with the director likely assumed this was a deliberate misnomer. Well, it is and isn’t. Happy End, which played at the Toronto International Film Festival, is perhaps one of the least-depressing films Haneke has made, while also still being plenty of bleak. There’s a bemusement at work here, as if Heneke is winking at the audience with every scene.

A year and a half ago, director Michael Hanekewas one actor away from rolling cameras on his long-gestating project, Flashmob. And then the whole thing fell apart and the master behind films like Funny Games, The Piano Teacher, Cache, and the Oscar-winning Amour found himself without a new film. But you can’t keep Germany’s master of cinematic misery down for too long, as he finally has another film in the pipeline and he’s reuniting with a few familiar performers.

The next Michael Haneke film is Happy End and it will star Isabelle Huppert and Jean-Louis Trintignant, both of whom are veterans of his previous films. Plot details are scarce at the moment, but we’ll go ahead and make this bold prediction: Huppert and Trintignant will endure severe physical and emotional torment in shot with such icy precision that your mind will reel.

It was just a few weeks ago that we talked about the fact that Michael Haneke is putting together a new film. Called Flashmob, the movie is one he conceptualized a few years ago, before setting it aside to make Amour. The concept has evolved a bit since then, but the basic core still seems to be that it “the fragile relationship between media and reality,” and features a set of characters who meet via the Internet. While early reports said the film would shoot this summer, it now seems that Flashmob will be delayed, as Haneke wants to wait for the availability of one particular actress.

This year’s Cannes Film Festival may have come and gone without a new film from Austrian director Michael Haneke (who won the 2012 Palme d’Or with Amour), but it looks like the filmmaker could hit the 2015 festival with his next film. Haneke is prepping to shoot a movie called Flashmob this summer, which means it should be rolling soon. This sounds like it is probably the culmination of ideas Haneke was toying with starting back in 2010, and we’ve got more details below. Read More »

For the 70th year, the Hollywood Foreign Press handed out their Golden Globe Awards Sunday night. Hosts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler entertained an audience of TV and movie fans there to bestow awards to shows like Girls, Modern Family, Smash, Breaking Bad, Homeland and Downton Abbeyand films like Lincoln, Argo, Django Unchained, Life of Pi,Silver Linings Playbook, Zero Dark Thirty and Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. Yes, I said Salmon Fishing in the Yemen.

That’s just one example of surprise nominees that make the Globes such a wild card each and every year. Check out all the winners below along with live commentary.

UPDATE: We’ve embedded a lot of the special moments from the show below. Read More »

This morning Megan Fox, Ed Helms, and Jessica Alba announced the nominations for the 2013 Golden Globes. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the organization behind the event, is famous for nominating films and performances simply based on their star factor — if there’s an actor that members of the HFPA want to hang out with, they’re sure to get a nomination.

But the HFPA is great at putting on a show, and so the Golden Globes generate a lot of attention every year. And, as the NY Times points out, with the Globes nominations coming just days before Oscar nomination voting starts, there’s a possibility that nominations here could affect Oscar voting. The Best Picture nomination set includes what is already becoming a standard set of awards favorites, such as Lincoln, Silver Linings Playbook, and Zero Dark Thirty, but there are also nominations for Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, and Django Unchained. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen picked up a few nominations, actually, which was one of the big surprises.

The Golden Globes will air on January 13, 2013, hosted by Amy Poehler and Tina Fey. The full nomination list is below. Read More »

There’s a lot to be said for timing when it comes to film awards, and in that respect things couldn’t have worked out better for Kathryn Bigelow‘s Zero Dark Thirty. While most audiences won’t even have a chance to see the film until early next year, the first screenings of the movie have drawn rave reviews. And now it has picked up what will likely be the first of many awards.

Today the New York Film Critics Circle voted on awards for 2012, and Zero Dark Thirty and Lincoln were the big winners, with nothing scored by The Master, Django Unchained, Les Miserables, or other potential awards faves. Kathryn Bigelow took Best Director and her movie won Best Film, which is the same dual wins the filmmaker enjoyed in 2009 before The Hurt Locker went on to Oscar success. Get the full list of recipients below. Read More »

Michael Haneke‘s latest film Amour (aka Love) is probably the saddest happy movie ever made. It tells the harrowing story of an elderly couple’s long time love for each other and how their bond is tested when one of them falls incredibly ill. Depressing? More than you can imagine. But Haneke’s realism and the unbelievable performances of his leads, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, somehow takes terrible pain and transforms it into an affirmation of life.

Audacious in its attempt to make opposite ends of the emotional spectrum into perfect complements, Amour is a true feat that’s not to be missed. The film won the Palme D’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and just played AFI Fest presented by Audi. Read more after the jump. Read More »